The present invention relates to a system for the packaging of products.
The present invention can be used to good advantage in the food packaging industry where the food products are placed on trays. The description which follows refers to this particular field of application but without thereby restricting the scope of the inventive concept.
In the packaging of food products, such as biscuits or chocolates, the products feeding out of the production units are placed directly on trays carried by a belt conveyor which feeds the trays themselves along a conveying line to a series of parallel packaging lines downstream. In most cases, between the production unit and the packaging lines there is a single buffer forming an intermediate storage unit for a plurality of trays which can be returned to the packaging lines.
The main disadvantages of known packaging systems of this kind are due to the fact that, if one of the packaging lines temporarily stops for any reason, the tray buffer feed cycle must be adjusted because the flow of trays feeding out of the buffer itself must be slowed down to take into account the smaller number of packaging lines still in operation downstream of the buffer along said conveying line.
Adjusting the feed cycle of the buffer is not only difficult to carry out with sufficient accuracy and promptness but may also have negative effects on the production process, for example, if the only buffer connected with the packaging lines is temporarily full, thus making it necessary to reduce the output of the machines which make the products in order to decrease the number of trays feeding out of them. All this has serious consequences for the operation of the entire system and for its production costs.
This problem may become even more serious if the stoppage involves more than one packaging line at the same time.
The aim of the present invention is to provide a product packaging system that is not affected by the problems described above.